NIH Researchers explore whether poor sleep is a cause or result of Long COVID.
Sleep is as important for our health as good food and clean water. It allows our brains to preserve memories and remove waste products. But for some people with Long COVID, sleep no longer comes easily.
Research suggests that about 40% of people with Long COVID report sleep issues among their symptoms. Problems can include insomnia, daytime sleepiness, waking up several times a night, or not feeling refreshed in the morning.
Two small studies supported by several institutes within the National Institutes of Health, including the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and National Institute on Aging (NIA), are examining sleep symptoms that can occur after COVID-19.
In one such study supported by NINDS, researchers will examine how sleep and pain interact and how they both relate to Long COVID. In another supported by NIA, researchers will look at how sleep and inflammation interact in older people to cause fatigue and memory and concentration problems, commonly known as “brain fog.” These neurological symptoms are also sometimes referred to as neuro-PASC (neurological post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection).
“If we can better understand the mechanisms behind these sleep problems, then maybe we can find treatments. If we find that sleep disturbances lead to pain and to inflammatory dysregulation, then we can directly target those as well as the sleep disturbances,” said Monika Haack, Ph.D., lead researcher on the sleep and pain project. She is a researcher at Harvard Medical School, where she works with study participants from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
The projects will take a close look at the quality of sleep that Long COVID patients experience. “It’s not just how much sleep you get,” said sleep researcher Kristen Knutson, Ph.D., of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and co-lead of the neuro-PASC study. “It’s a complicated phenomenon. We want to understand which pieces are particularly important for different health outcomes.”
These two projects are not supported by NIH’s Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, a large, nationwide research program to understand Long COVID and develop methods to predict, treat, and prevent the condition. One of RECOVER’s clinical trial protocols, called RECOVER-SLEEP, will study treatments for changes in sleep patterns and the ability to sleep after having COVID-19.